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Thanks to a viral Facebook campaign calling for the creation of a “Beautiful and Bald Barbie,” Mattel’s iconic blonde figurehead will soon be getting a fashionably hairless friend, complete with her own wigs, hats, scarves, and other accessories that kids can swap out or remove at whim. The toymaker announced the doll last week — on its official Facebook page, appropriately — and said that she would be distributed next year to children’s hospitals around the country, “directly reaching girls who are most affected by hair loss.” The company also plans to donate a number of dolls and money to CureSearch for Children’s Cancer and the National Alopecia Areata Foundation.

The “Beautiful and Bald Barbie” campaign was started in December by moms Rebecca Sypin and Jane Bingham, both of whom have been personally touched by cancer in some way — Sypin through her daughter’s experience with leukemia, and Bingham through her own experience with non-Hodgkin lymphoma. The women’s goal, per their Facebook page, was simple: to provide a bald role model for “young girls who suffer from hair loss due to cancer treatments, alopecia, or trichotillomania,” as well as for “girls who are having trouble coping with their mother’s hair loss from chemo."

“[We want girls to know] they’re not dependent on their hair for their self-worth and their beauty,” Bingham, 41, told CBS’s HealthPop. “[For] women and children, it’s looked down upon that you would go out without your hair. People would automatically assume that you’re sick and you should stay at home in bed. We wanted to change this stigma.”

"[My daughter] was bald for about seven months, and we would go to the store, and people would stare, or kids would ask her why she's bald,” Sypin, 32, explained to MSNBC. “It's not something they're used to seeing. We think [a bald Barbie] would be therapeutic, and I think it would help baldness become more quote-unquote normal."

Others seem to agree. The campaign started small, but word of what the mothers were trying to do quickly spread through social media, and in just four months, the page got more than 156,000 “Likes” on Facebook — not to mention attention from several major news and health organizations (including Everyday Health).

“I think having an image of a bald child or bald adult — whether it’s Barbie or not — does promote a positive message in the mainstream,” psychologist Deanna Pledge, PhD, told MSNBC. “And Barbie is clearly in the mainstream.

"Parents might be forced to have discussions with their children as to why Barbie is bald, but I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing," she added. "There would be more people talking about it and discussing it instead of just looking at the children as different. They may feel that it's more normal, and I think that could be helpful."

The only major drawback, it seems, is that the company has decided not to make the dolls available for sale and is instead donating them to kids in hospitals.

"If you're wanting to make a Barbie doll that's different, and you're wanting to show kids who are different that they can be different, why not show it to normal kids so that they can accept the different kids?" 15-year-old alopecia patient Olivia Rusk told WTHR-TV in Indianapolis.

It's a valid point, but advertising expert Donny Deutsch thinks Mattel did the right thing. "It’s called direct marketing, target marketing, right there where they can be used, in the hospitals," he said on the Today show. "You go, Mattel.”

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